“Web 2.0″ in just under 5 minutes.

Cool video I found digging through all my old posts… still a good watch:
Video at YouTube

Jaxer & XAMPP – JavaScript Bliss

Being that I just started my new job at Aptana, one of the first things they asked me to do is learn everything I can about Jaxer and to document that process. For those of you who don’t know yet, Jaxer is essentially and AJAX server. The very long story short is that you now have the ability to run JavaScript on the server-side (no more cross-site restrictions!), and along with that ability you get some pretty kick-ass API functionality that isn’t normally an inherent part of JS (such as built-in filesystem or database functionality). Essentially, you can now write the better part, if not all of your web apps in JavaScript. What’s even cooler is that you don’t need to give up the technologies that you currently use in order to implement Jaxer. I’ll be writing on how you can blend all these new and existing technologies in the near future (perhaps even make my screen-casting debut), but for now I want to talk about how to get Jaxer set up with an existing Apache install, specifically an XAMPP-based development environment.

Granted you can download a stand-alone Jaxer+Apache bundle, but if you’re like me, you want to be able to start seeing how it plays with existing web technologies (for me, that would be PHP). The other thing that you’ve probably already got (if you’re like me) is a test / development environment locally, and it’s most likely XAMPP (or something similar). Finally, if you’re slightly OCD like me, you like to have everything in one place, all nice and organized. Well, you’re in luck, because I’m going to show you how to get all of this goodness up and running. My examples will be for a Mac install of XAMPP, but the Windows / Linux methods will be pretty darned close. The only caveat with this walk-through is that it is written based on the upcoming 0.9.5 release (which will be out within the next week or so), and this is because it covers some important changes from the 0.9.4 releases. Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let’s get into how we can get all this up and running. Read on…

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Sitepoint Releases HTML Reference

From Ajaxian – While this is not strictly Ajax or JavaScript related, it is noteworthy to point out that Sitepoint just released a HTML reference that is quite handy to have around if you wonder if what you are building is really HTML or just tagsoup.
Sitepoint HTML Reference

35 Fantastic HDR Pictures

Some really good stuff, worth a quick glance. HDR is High Dymanic Range, a post-processing technique that, when done right, yields some really awesome results.
www.smashingmagazine.com

Thoughts on What Makes a Job Good… or Bad

If you were to take a look at my resume, you’d probably wonder why anybody would hire me… In the past three years I’ve had 4 jobs. Luckily for me, every job I left, I left for a good reason, and I could explain those reasons to the satisfaction of the next employer. But I’m not writing this to talk bad about previous employers, but rather to share a little of the knowledge I’ve gathered along the way (and supplement that with other people’s of course). Of course, this is all mostly relevant to development jobs, but I’m sure other people could take from this what they will.

Reasons My Jobs Sucked

There’s a lot of nit-picky things I could say here, but I won’t, I’d rather stick to the broad topics…

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